“They sow the wind. And reap the whirlwind.” - Hosea 8:7 NKJV

After a year I had adjusted to the reality, I was out of The Alley physically. But the baggage of my past, not really knowing my father and having the kind of stable background I had craved, haunted me, like a Texas Tornado making its way west across the plains to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Like a twister on a rampage, it left a path of destruction; everything in its way swallowed up and destroyed.

My tornado not only included my experiences with my father and step father, The Alley and all that represented, but also the larger spectre that faced all black people in America at the time, Jim Crow, the Minstrel Shows, segregation, and discrimination.

I had seen the walls of Huntsville prison where people waited for their date with Old Sparky and realized that for many of us, our lives were overshadowed by a sense of impending doom, just like that prairie twister.

But even more than my external circumstances, which on the surface had infinitely improved, the storm, the sense of anger, aggression and entitlement were bubbling up inside of me, out of control. It seemed there was no way to suppress it or control it and my experiences at Colorado only made it worse.

I had gone from an anonymous, disenfranchised black kid living in The Alley in Huntsville, to an athlete attending an upscale white university on a football scholarship, with an opportunity to play on national television in front of millions.

But while I was allowed in the candy store, I and my black team mates were not permitted to sample the candy, that was clear and our youthful ignorance and worse our defiance over this was about to derail the whole venture.

The situation reminded me of the Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy gets sucked up by a big Kansas Tornado and ends up in the land of Oz. Here I was in a strange land thinking I had left The Alley and much of what it represented, only to end up in the land of odd........